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Bird by Bird - Some Instructions on Writing and Life

3 stars (Tone is wearing) - In "Bird by Bird," author Anne Lamott offers a reasonable amount of advice on the craft and reality of writing. Many of her suggestions are intriguing and creative: writing to a one-inch frame, comparing writing to a Polaroid photo, writing as a letter or a present. The best and most compelling sections of this book are those in which she writes extensively about her own experiences. Several sections are genuinely moving. Unfortunately, Lamott has a rambling, obsessive, stream-of-consciousness style of writing which reminds me of the Cathy comic strip. Here's an example from the book: "You may begin showing signs of schizophrenia--like you'll stare at the word schizophrenia so long that it will start to look wrong and you won't be able to find it in the dictionary and you'll start to think you made it up, and then you'll notice a tiny mouth sore, one of those tiny canker sores that your tongue can't keep away from, that feels like a wound the size of a marble, but when you go to study it in the mirror, you see that it is a white spot roughly as big as a pinhead. Still, the next thing you know--because you're spending too much time alone--you are convinced that you have mouth cancer, just like good old Sigmund, and you know instantly that doctors will have to cut away half your jaw, trying to save your miserable obsessive-compulsive head from being cannibalized by the cancer, and you'll have to go around wearing a hood over your entire face, and no one will ever want to kiss you again, not that they ever really did." Some readers may find that style of writing delightfully funny. I found it wearing and annoying. To be fair, in this excerpt, Lamott was illustrating how the mind wanders when one is trying to write. But this was not the first excerpt in the book that dealt with mouth sores, and this writing style pervades the entire book. It should also be noted that Lamott uses frequent profanity. I would not be comfortable recommending ...
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